Hard Disk Not Found

I have an older computer (maybe 10 years old), Phoenix 6.0, running on XP. It was running fine but my 3-year-old so decided to bang his hands on the top of the tower (just above the hard drive) while it was running. The computer then started back up but it started to say unable to boot and asked me put in the CD. I kept trying to reboot the computer but it kept doing the same thing. I put the XP CD in to boot and decided to see if I could just repair it but it wouldn't let me. It kept saying unable to detect hard disk. I tried to just install XP again (the computer was just for the kids use) and it still said unable to detect hard disk. What do you think it is? Did my son's banging on the computer do something to the hard drive? I opened it up and couldn't find anything wrong. The only other thing I hear is this buzzing sound that goes off and on every 5 seconds…which it never used to do…any help would be great, thanks!!! Mike

Hello mossimo817,

Sorry to hear that you're having problems,

By the sounds of it the hard drive's head ( the mechanism which reads and writes the disks ) is broken, bent or knocked out of place. Unfortunately, there isn't much you can do about it. If you don't have any backups, you might be able to recover the contents of the hard drive if you take it to a recovery specialist.

The following Microsoft article might help you in testing the hard drive :
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

I would suggest running "Chkdsk" via Command Prompt to check the health of the disk.

If the machine is a Dell you can run a Disk Self Test:
http://support.dell.com/support/topics/glo…0401E0A55174AE6

If you can get any of the above tests to run, let me know what sort of error reports it gives you and we can see what can be done.


Cheers,
Nahumi